Authors First Book Hits The Jackpot

‘Pigeon English’ by Stephen Kelman has amazed critics and other writers the world over. This was Stephen’s first book and it tells the story of a 5 month period in the life of a twelve year old boy who had just arrived from Ghana.

Stephen showed nobody his manuscript and asked for no opinions, he simply sent it in the old fashioned way in a brown paper envelope, to a number of publishers. Normally anything delivered by this method goes into the slush pile and may never see the light of day no matter how good it is.

The present economic situation in UK means that publishers are extra careful about what they publish. Stephen was given a £100,000 advance on his book and a contract by Conville & Walsh but what was even more remarkable is that he received offers from no less than eleven other publishers.

His book is already getting publicity and many people are waiting for it to be released. Everyone wants to know what it is about this book that makes so many publishers to give him a contract for it.

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Full Time Writing Work

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to get a job writing for a UK company and I got several quite meaty assignments about films, film stars, and a set of travel articles. I was very pleased with this.

Then I received an email asking if I would like to edit for them too. At first I wasn't sure but I soon got into their way of doing things.

They had been reading my blogs and my work over at Factoidz.

They were impressed by the range of subjects that I cover and I signed up with them to write and edit any available category.

On top of this I landed two perment jobs writing sets of articles for a couple of web designer.

Add to this my blogs, Triond, Factoidz and my own new website Lookaround Cumbria and I am very busy.

Well, I wanted enough work to keep me going full time and now I've got it. I would like to be able to select the jobs I do a bit more often but you can't have everything. It's a case of writing what the buyers want if you want to make a living in this game.

The one thing I can say is that I love my work. I look forward to getting up in the morning and looking in my email to find new assignments and notifications that I've been paid (that's my favourite!)

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Health Insurance Leads For Brokers And Agents

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Would You Give Your Readers Old Recycled Posts?

I recently read an article written by a blogger who boasted that when he had nothing to write about, he recycled old posts. He didn’t rewrite them, or change them, or even take a different perspective. He almost bragged that he wrote an introduction of at least a hundred words, then tacked the old stuff on the end. This was given as advice to bloggers and he even said that search engines do not notice this, so they do not penalize the blogger. To be honest, the article itself was a recycled version of something he had written before.

I am not going to name the blogger, or the blog, but I was quite puzzled as to why he would want to write a post if he had nothing to write about. Surely readers would feel cheated by being fed old recycled and search engines would have no reason to send traffic there as there would no new information.

I must say that I have never recycled, or tried to sneakily pop in an old post just to get something on the page. It feels like cheating the reader and I would be too afraid of wrecking what has taken years to build up.

There are many more experienced and savvy bloggers around than me and I would be interested in having their viewpoints on this practise.

Is it useful just to keep things turning, or is it blog suicide for a blog that is becoming financially successful?

Why Some Blogs Earn Money

This article was published by me on Triond. They say that it is all showing correctly, but it isn't. The article does not show on the contents page so I have no way of tracking reads, or earnings. I have been 'told off' for being impatient and then told that the article is showing there. It isn't! Nobody has done a thing about it. So, here it is in its entirety for anyone who wishes to read it. Why should I send traffic to Triond withoiut getting anything for it?

Okay, rant over!!

I own a number of blogs, all of which make a little bit of money for me each month, but one of them stands out from the rest, attracts paid advertising and is starting to make a very healthy income. When I started out blogging, I had no idea what I was doing, so I asked questions and read a lot of articles about blogging. Some I understood and others left me puzzled, so I left them and went back to them later.

I asked myself why this particular blog should make more than the others put together.

First of all, I have to say that I set out to make it a commercial blog that didn’t look commercial. I wanted to give readers something interesting to read and to get them to keep coming back. Originally I started blogging about England and its history, lifestyle, legends, news, folklore, etc but I quickly realised that I needed to broaden the subject a bit. So, I started to include the rest of Britain.

I try to inject a little bit of light humour into my writing and to cover just about any subject that has a British theme. The main thing here is that I have to like whatever I am blogging about as a story, and then I have to stop and wonder if my readers will like it.

Unusual posts like the story of the hedgehog that gave birth to triplets in a five star hotel get lots of reads. That particular one went really crazy and is still getting views. I have had more than 30,000 views on it so far. This is what is called a pillar post. Ordinary, everyday posts bring in readers but a pillar post will bring a lot of traffic for a long time. It isn’t always possible to predict which posts will perform like this but it’s great when they do.

Another post about the Englishman and his bow and arrow has had a steady stream of reads and will continue to do so. This took me by surprise because I hadn’t expected it to do so well.

The point here is that posts can be written to last. If they are good enough they will be picked up by search engines and continue to get traffic for months, or even years. I don’t wait for search engines to pick up the posts. If I think something might do well, I add it myself and do the same with social networking sites. Of course, my guess isn’t always right and I don’t add every post.

The main thing that has made this particular blog a success is that I post something almost every day and sometimes more than once a day, depending on how busy I am. Louie’s Words now has 464 posts and gets a steady flow of traffic every day.

It has taken a lot of dedicated work but now gets offers of advertising to add to its existing revenue. It grows gradually month by month and is proof that anyone can have a blog that pays if they are prepared work at it. The key to it is persistence and writing for your readers, not just for yourself. Louie's Words has had a lot more time and effort spent on it than the others in my collection have and that's why it is performing much better. There's no secret; just hardwork.

Triond: What's Going On? Does Anyone Know?

I do a bit of writing for Triond the content publishing site and have always earned a reasonable monthly amount for my work. Okay, it was never a fortune but with around 600 articles in their system I have been getting a nice residual income.

Last month everything was suddenly chopped by about 25%. Adsense revenue and Triond income reduced suddenly. I thought that it was perhaps seasonal until the end of January when revenue plummeted by a further 33%. My actual numbers of reads are up in total and I have also added new articles. What on earth is going on?

Things started to go pear shaped just before Triond added Adsense to their system and I suspect that this was an attempt to recoup some of their falling advertising revenue.

The ‘dashboard’ page has not worked for a few months; it refuses to load and the earned income figure stays the same for days on end, even though reads and money earned on articles has gone up. The Hot Content contains articles that quite frankly should never have been published (not all of them, some are excellent). The list gets cut to 5 articles instead of ten after three or four days and then stays the same. Go to the Hot Users list and you’ll see that some writers with huge numbers of articles are not included and others who have never written anything are up there in bold letters.

It can take four days to publish an article that is carefully crafted and by an experienced writer and loads of ‘junk’ in broken English, some of it extremely seedy and almost obscene, is churned out dozens at a time. What are the so called editors doing? Ask them a question and you rarely get an answer unless it benefits them.

Good writers are moving out and only occasionally dropping in just to keep their residual earnings coming in but the way things are going it won’t even be worth spending time doing that.

However, no one from Triond seems to realize that there is less advertising revenue to be had and advertisers don’t want to place ads on pages that contain badly written, inaccurate articles, some of which are penned by people who are clearly barely literate in English. A large chunk of the content is copied from books and this is very obvious where the writer writes excellent, technically corrected English about things like medicine, science and technology but when you look at their profile and comments they have written, their English is of a very poor standard. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out what is going on here.

What a mess, something clearly has to give or Triond’s revenue will soon be down to pennies. Who wants to advertise on sites that print rubbish (Triond runs a whole lot of sites) and what’s more, which dedicated writer wants to write on a site where the publishers don’t care what they publish as long as they get content? Some of the health information and advice is quite frankly dangerous and irresponsible. They recently published an article advocating eating raw pork to cure cancer. How irresponsible can they get? How to stop your husband from drinking heavily was answered with the advice that you should tell him you don’t like it and if he loves you he will stop. What rubbish! The list goes on but I don’t want to turn this into a rant.

Does anyone know what’s really going on? There seems to be a ‘don’t care attitude’ from Triond’s staff.

Health Insurance Leads For Agents And Brokers

It takes a lot of time to find leads when you are in the insurance business and you sell health insurance. You could save yourself a great deal of time, frustration and energy by going to ProspectZone for your health insurance leads. If you work as an agent, or even as a broker, this service will be useful to you and your business.

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